kekseksa

Introduction




(This article appeared in the July issue of The Connexion, an English-language newspaper published monthly in France as the first in a series of profiles of canidates in the French presidential elections of 2007.)


Who needs elections when one has opinion polls? With the 2007 presidential elections in prospect, the French pollsters, supported by the media, have already been working overtime. Hardly a day goes by without a blow-by-blow account of the two candidates now expected to dominate the election – Nicolas Sarkozy in the blue corner, Ségolène Royal in the red. Yet neither of the two largest parties has in fact yet chosen its candidate and the majority of other candidates have still to declare. Despite this air of unreality, the polls are beginning to assume something of the air of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mirror, mirror….

Long before the era of the internet and the video-game, the French acquired a taste for ‘virtual’ politics. In the 1880s, at the height of la Belle Époque, a furore of popular enthusiasm swept to sudden fame a vacuous if handsomely moustachioed cavalry officer called Georges Boulanger. For a brief, mad moment it seemed as though nothing could prevent Boulanger, on the crest of popular acclaim, from marching on the presidential palace and proclaiming himself head of state. In the event, the general hesitated and took flight, the moment of madness passed and, shortly afterwards, as ineffectually chivalric in death as in life, Boulanger committed suicide, in exile, on the grave of his former lover.

In the long run-up to the presidential elections of 1995, a similar fit of ‘virtuality’ convulsed the media. Long before the election itself, they were talking of the result as though it were a foregone conclusion. The man of the moment was the retiring President of the European Commission, socialist Jacques Delors and for several weeks all the polls gave him a huge advance over any other potential candidate. Unfortunately nobody had thought to ask Delors whether he actually intended to stand and the bubble burst abruptly when he announced that he had no intention of doing so.

This time round, the right has had little need for the magic mirror of the opinion-polls. From the moment when he admitted to thinking of the presidency while shaving of a morning, Nicolas Sarkozy has confidently predicted his own candidature and events seem now to be justifying his confidence. Through thick and thin he has adroitly managed to maintain through a fairly constant popularity with the right-wing electorate. The reassurance Sarkozy finds in his shaving-mirror, the Parti Socialiste, with a proliferation of presidential hopefuls, has been obliged to seek in the opinion polls.

For a time the pollsters’ favourite was former Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. Jospin has been in self-imposed political retirement since 2002 and the forecast return to favour never seemed very probable. Certainly left-wing voters were disenchanted with the PS leadership – popularly referred to as ‘the elephants’; certainly they harboured a certain sentiment of guilt about the divided vote that had led to Jospin’s defeat in 2002. Nevertheless his supposed popularity as a potential candidate for 2007 had all the familiar characteristics of political fantasy.

It was short-lived. Over recent months, Jospin’s poll-ratings have sunk as those of Ségolène Royal have spectacularly risen. Not regarded as a serious contender until the Spring of this year, she has now become clear favourite in the polls for the candidature (to be decided in the autumn) and is placed on an equal footing with Sarkozy for the presidency itself (April-May). With a fair while to go before either event, it is reasonable to wonder if once again one is not in the realm of the purely virtual.

As with Jospin, the initial impulse seems to have been essentially sentimental. Sexist remarks by other socialist leaders in response to the suggestion of a Royal candidature sparked off a certain sympathy that tied in well with a long-standing desire amongst the electorate for a different kind of leader and a different kind of politics. The fact that she is a woman has contributed greatly to her current popularity. Confronted with an array of hidebound elephants, it is unsurprising if the public express a preference for something more in the nature of an okapi.

Such sentiment is not the stuff of genuine political popularity. Until very recently little was known about the political views of a young woman who had only previously served in government as a relatively junior minister. She is working hard to fill that vacuum. Starting with a declared support in general terms for a sort of French ‘Blairism’, she has proceeded along classic ‘Blairite’ lines to privilege public relations (particularly via her website Désirs de l’avenir) and to steal the clothes of her political opponents. As in the case of Blair in the nineties, this has taken the form of talking tough on crime (boot-camps for delinquents) and making friendly gestures to the business community (back-pedalling on the 35-hour week).

This strategy was successful for ‘New Labour’ in a British context because Blair could be reasonably certain that traditional Labour voters would have nowhere else to go. In a richer and more volatile French political environment, it is a good deal more risky since the divided French left is unlikely to follow so tamely. Nor is there any real evidence that ‘Blairism’ has any greater appeal for the French electorate than it has nowadays for disillusioned British voters. The undoubted sympathy that the polls reveal for Royal as a personality (ségolisme in the candidate’s own preferred term) is far from certain to convert into real political support for the Royal agenda. Even if chosen candidate in April, she risks finding herself outmanoeuvred on her right and outflanked on her left.

Opinion polls here do not altogether play the same role as in British politics. In Britain, they measure the respective popularity of the political parties (even if this is increasingly expressed in terms of the popularity of their leaders). It is actually those parties and their leaders will contest any election in prospect. In France, no political leader is a candidate for anything at all until they declare officially. Until that time, the polls are little more than a beauty contest and can prove to be something of a distorting mirror for predicting ‘the fairest of them all’. There is a great deal of difference between a potential candidate (magnet for all kinds of passing fancies) and a real one (object of more severe political judgement).

Another recent opinion poll was rather more revealing of the prevailing mood of the French electorate. When asked what confidence they had in the two main parties, only fifteen per cent of those polled had confidence in the UMP (the party in power) but, more surprisingly, only fifteen per cent expressed confidence in the socialist opposition. Seventy per cent of the electorate remains therefore largely unconcerned in the presidential contest currently being promised by the pollsters and the media. Until French politicians of whatever allegiance can begin to gain the hearts and minds of that seventy per cent, the poll-ratings of a Sarko or a Ségo represent little more than a kind of media-fantasy.

(This article is due to appear in the February issue of The Connexion, an English-language newspaper published monthly in France as the first in a series of profiles of canidates in the French presidential elections of 2007.)




(Act-Up Paris' controversial poster, emphasising the extent to which the right (and especially Nicolas Sarkozy) have attempted to 'recuperate' Front National votes.



At the age of seventy-five, Jean Marie Le Pen will doubtless be the oldest of the candidates standing in the presidential elections of 2007. For this son of a Breton fisherman it will in all probability be the last throw in a long political career and, although his success of 2002 will be difficult to follow, he will surely be hoping to go out with a bang. In 1974 (the first year in which he was a presidential candidate) he obtained less than one percent of the vote; in 1988, he surprised everyone by a score of 14 percent; in 2002 Le Pen, present in both rounds, was supported by 16.86% and 17.79% respectively.

Le Pen made his debut in politics in 1956, the youngest deputy in the National Assembly for the peasant party of Pierre Poujade. After a stint in the parachute regiment in Algeria (an episode that has always endeared him to Europeans repatriated after independence), he supported the right-wing leader Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour before forming his own party, the Front National, in 1972. The FN, a composite formed from various groups on the extreme right, has played a significant role in French politics ever since.

The party is characterised by a farouche nationalism (les français d’abord) and views on immigration that most would regard as racist. Otherwise its tough line on law and order and its neo-liberal economic policies differ very little from those of the conventional far right, relatively similar to those of the Sarkozyist wing of the UMP or to those of the MPF, the very Catholic, very eurosceptic, very nationalist party led by Philippe de Villiers. What distinguishes the FN is its populist appeal, it appeal to the socially and politically excluded, its anti-establishment flavour. Unlike leaders of similar parties elsewhere in Europe, Le Pen has consistently refused to ally himself with the traditional right. Although the subject of constant debate within the FN and the cause of nearly all its internal disputes, this calling of a plague on both houses (le pire et le mal, as Le Pen put it in 1988) has allowed the party to maintain a strong independent identity.

The French political classes, in shunning the FN, have always made two signal errors. One is the consistent tendency (against all the evidence) to dismiss the vote for the extreme right as an ephemeral protest vote. At first commentators predicted that the FN would simply disappear in the manner of the contemporary British party of the same name. Every year since those same commentators blithely find new reasons to write the party’s obituary, only to see their predictions confounded by the polls where the FN vote has remained, through thick and thin, remarkably solid.

The other persistent error is the belief (on the right) that it is possible to ‘recuperate’ the FN’s electorate by mimicking its rhetoric. This has been a constant temptation to one right-wing politician after another over the years and the current efforts in this direction by Nicolas Sarkozy (within the UMP) and Philippe de Villiers (outside it) are repetitions of a very familiar pattern. In practice the only gainer from such tactics is the FN itself. For a while the polls boost the popularity of this or that ‘hard man’ of the right, but in the end FN voters invariably ‘prefer the original to the copy’. In recent years Le Pen has hardly needed to campaign at all; the right has done his work for him. In 2002 a near-hysterical law-and-order campaign contributed significantly to Le Pen’s success in the presidential elections. In 2005 crude responses to the rioting in Paris (characterised as a ‘racial’ problem) brought a further flood of new members to the Front National.

Le Pen will make much in 2007 (as he does at each presidential election) of his difficulty in procuring the 500 signatures (of mayors and other élus) necessary for the candidature. He was indeed unable to stand in 1981 for this reason but it may now simply be a gimmick to attract sympathy and boost his image as an ‘anti-establishment’ figure. It is preposterous that a candidate with such strong popular support should risk exclusion from the contest and is yet another respect in which attempts to sideline Le Pen so often turn to his advantage by giving him cheap and easy publicity.

The same is true of the prosecutions of Le Pen (and currently of his deputy Bruno Gollnisch) under the law that criminalises negationism (denial of the holocaust). Anti-semitism plays no part in the immigration debate (directed principally against immigrants from the Maghreb) but Le Pen has continually used provocative statements about wartime atrocities to attract easy publicity. His most famous dictum – that the gas chambers were merely ‘a detail of history’ – dates way back to1987 but he brings it out of the cupboard again (most recently on British television in 2005) every time he feels in want of a headline.

In 2007 much will depend on who the two principal candidates turn out to be. Two relatively consensus candidates (the two Dominiques, for instance, De Villepin for the left of the right and Strauss-Kahn for the right of the left) would attract to the FN a great many voters who felt excluded from the consensus. A more ideological battle (Sarkozy for the right opposed by a populist candidate of the left) would leave less political space for Le Pen but, as the FN vote could go almost equally to a populist movement of the left as to the right, he might still exert considerable influence on the final result.

With new disputes and new defections (notably that of Jacques Bompard, mayor of Orange) again weakening the FN, the usual attempts to bury the FN by wishful thinking are making themselves heard. The crisis that split the party in 1998(the defection of Bruno Mégret) was followed in 2002 by Le Pen’s most spectacular electoral success to date. It would be a grave folly to underestimate Le Pen again in 2007.

(For earlier articles publshed see my own site

Contrary to the impression that one often receives, cinema does not belong, and has never belonged, to the United States of America. Even Hollywood cinema itself has not always belonged in any real sense to the United States of America. The presence particularly of German and Austrian emigrants (Murnau, Von Stroheim, Lang, Lubitsch, Von Sternberg, Zinneman, Wilder, Wyler, Preminger) revolutionised the American cinema and effectively dominated its heyday. The United States (in the first half of the twentieth century) was of course still a country built on immigration and it is unsurprising that Hollywood directors should have diverse European origins (Frank Capra was born in Sicily, Lewis Milestone in Russia) but the Germans and Austrians are to some extent a case apart in that they all emigrated as adults and many had already had substantial careers as film-makers in Austria or Germany before their arrival in the United States. What is more they remained to a remarkable extent a distinctive and interlinked group and all retained strong affinities with European cinema.

Lang and Murnau had been the two great rival talents of German cinema in the twenties; Von Stroheim, who had not worked in cinema before coming to America, was given his big break by fellow-Austrian Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios; Lubitsch was already a celebrated actor and film-director in Berlin before coming to the States; Zinneman, Wilder and Robert Siodmak had all worked together in Vienna in 1929 along with Edgar Ulmer (future "King of the B's") who had previously been assistant to Murnau; Zinneman first worked in America as assistant to Austrian writer and director Berthold Viertel; Preminger had been a major theatre-director in pre-war Vienna as had Wilhelm Thiele before going on to make films in Germany. In America, it was Preminger who completed Lubitsch's last film afterthe great man's death in 1948 while Thiele worked for a time as assistant to Joseph Von Sternberg; Von Sternberg first came to America from Austria when only seven but deliberately added the "von" to his name (he was born plain Jonas Sternberg) and returned to Germany in 1930 to make Der Blaue Engel with German actor Emil Jannings (and, in the process, of course to discover Marlene Dietrich). Jannings, whose first talkie this was, had already been directed by Von Sternberg in America during the silent era and had previously starred in German films directed by Murnau and Lubitsch. Austrian-born cameraman Karl Freund had worked both with Lang and Murnau in Germany before becoming a key-member of Laemmle's team at Universal Studios in America.


William Wyler, born of Swiss parents in Alsace (then part of Germany), came to America very young but he too was a protégé of Laemmle, a disciple of Lubitsch and close lifelong friend of Billy Wilder; Wilder himself, an established script-writer in Berlin before the war, worked in America in that capacity for both Lubitsch and Thiele before getting his chance to direct. To the list one might also add the Hungarian Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) who had been making films for fifteen years in Hungary, then Austria and Germany before coming to America in 1926. His compatriot, the actor Bela Lugosi had also had a distinguished acting career in Hungary and Germany before emigrating in 1920 and another Hungarian actor Peter Lorre had first made his name in Germany in Fritz Lang's M (1931). Twenty years later Lorre would return to Germany to make his sole film as director (and star), Der Verlorene (1951). Robert Wiene, director of one of the great classics of German cinema, Der Kabinett des Doktors Caligari (1919) also left Germany but chose to settle in Paris where he died in 1938 but it was Hollywood director Robert Siodmak who completed his last film Ultimatum.

The early history of American cinema (as recounted in the countless newsreels) is essentially one of vaudeville (with smatterings of epic and melodrama). The vaudeville, drawing as it did on both American and British traditions, was inspired - Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy or the acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks - but vaudeville (with certain exceptions in the case of Chaplin and Keaton) it remains. The epics are grandiose and the melodramas overpowering but epic and melodrama - again with the occasional exception - they remain. Despite memorable work by D. W. Griffiths and others, Hollywood cinema in the twenties and thirties would have been in artistic terms a rather primitive affair without the input from European film-makers. Early American cinema offers nothing comparable to the films being made in Germany by the likes of Robert Wiene (Caligari), Georg Pabst (Die Büchse der Pandora, Atlantis, Dreigroschenoper), Friedrich Murnau (Nosferatu, Der Letzte Mann) and Fritz Lang (Metropolis, Doctor Mabuse, M). These cinematic classic of the first decades of the century also provide a continual source of inspiration that has never ceased to reinvigorate cinema. It is common to talk somewhat glibly of 'expressionism' with regard to this period of German cinema even though Lang always explicitly rejected the label and Murnau was never keen to revindicate it. The cap fits well enough with respect to Robert Wiene's Das Kabinett des Doktors Caligari (1919), whose remarkable painted sets an distorted perspectives are strongly reminiscent of contemporary expressionist painting and the work of all the directors cited is, to some extent or other, influenced by expressionism and the whole variety of post-Romantic movements in art and literature that flourished during the pre-war period, but the real significance of their cinema is much broader and more far-reaching.

Pre-War Cinema in Germany and Austria

The great advantage that German cinema had over Hollywood (and which European cinema was to continue to have for most of the century) lay not merely in the quality of its writers and directors but in the degree of artistic independence that they enjoyed. The problem with Hollywood is (and has always been) the power of the producers and accountants and, in the early years at least, the dominance of the studio system. A nightmare for American artists (it all but destroyed Buster Keaton), the loss of independence was often well-nigh unendurable for the immigrants. Those from Germany and Austria were in effect between a rock and a hard place. Most could not return to Europe if they wanted. Those who did, like Pabst and the actor Jannings, simply ruined their careers in another way by collaboration with the wartime German régime, whose influence was doubly deadly (although in a rather different manner) to the independence of the film-makers. The rise of Hitler is, apart from everything else, one of the most appalling tragedies in the history of cinema. The notion that it was, in some sense, 'good for Hollywood', is fundamentally untrue. The well-being of Hollywood (along with the well-being of cinema in general) depends fundamentally on independent input from Europe or elsewhere. To weaken or destroy one area of cinema is, ultimately, to weaken cinema everywhere. This remains of course just as true today as it was in the 1930s and 1940s.


There are dangers in talking of 'serious' cinema (or, in the awful phrase, 'art' cinema). To do so immediately creates a false (and damaging) dichotomy. There is no such thing as 'art' cinema. There are quite simply good films and bad films. Nor are the producers and accountants always wrong in their insistence on the importance of bums on seats in the cinema. Nonetheless if cinema globally is to be of a high quality, it needs, like any other art, an input that, for want of a better expression, is intellectual. 'Serious' films in this sense, quite apart from their intrinsic value, are also vital to the existence of a vibrant 'popular' cinema. 'High' and 'low' culture (again for want of better expressions) are never in practice in competition or in any way mutually exclusive; they are complementary and mutually dependent. What is therefore important about pre-war German cinema is that it is a serious cinema in this sense - a cinema of ideas and, for that matter, of ideology, for it is also, in the widest sense of the term, a socially and politically engaged cinema, something that the Hollywood system has (generally speaking) always prevented American cinema from being.


Take, for instance, Fritz Lang's M (1931). This is the first really important celluloid treatment of a theme that has become (rather sadly) predominant in modern American cinema - the 'serial killer'. The unforgettable performance of Peter Lorre (far and away his best) and the film's dazzling technicl virtuosity as a suspense-thriller have tended to overshadow the fact that a good third of the film is devoted to a realistic portrayal of the German underworld (featuring actual underworld figures amongst the actors) and concludes with a complex debate about the nature of crime and punishment, the guilt (or otherwise) of the 'compulsive' killer, the right (or otherwise) to inflict capital punishment. Its portrayal of Berlin beggars is clearly influenced by Brecht's Threepenny Opera (1928), itself the subject, the following year of a film adaptation by Pabst. There is a similarly complex social and psychological setting for Pabst's Die Büchse der Pandora (Lulu), starring Louis Brookes and based on Frank Wedekind's disturbing 1908 drama. Here again the appearance of a serial killer (Jack the Ripper) is of more than merely prurient interest. Lang's M also touches on the subject of the psychosis, not of killers but of the 'general public' in its response to crime. This had also featured in Murnau's screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula made in 1922, Nosferatu. In a scene cut from some versions, a frenzied crowd attacks a scarecrow in the belief that it is the escaped lunatic Renfield (renamed in Murnau's version) whom they are chasing. The same theme is explored in another silent film on the subject of a serial killer made by a young English director (working however for a subsidiary of Paramount), The Lodger (1926), in which a mysterious man is (wrongly) believed to be the killer and is pursued by a frenzied crowd. The young Englishman who made the film was of course Alfred Hitchcock.


It hardly needs emphasising that there is a very measurable distance between the treatment of the subject of the serial killer in Lang's 1931 (and for that matter in young Hitchcock's The Lodger) from that one encounters thirty years later in Hollywood-Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), which, for all its virtues, has abandoned sensibility for sensation and replaced intellectual curiosity with a sort of glib pop psychology. There is a distance of light years between Lang's film and the unhealthy prurience and totally blunted sensibilities of such 'popular' modern examples of the 'genre' as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Seven (1995). The fact that all three modern films mentioned are extremely well-directed, well-scripted and well-acted merely emphasises that the qualities of a film are not limited to any of these things. A film is also the product of the ideas that go into it. And, as the informaticians say, 'Garbage in, garbage out'. To find a 'modern' treatment of the serial killer that has the intelligence of Lang's M, one would have to look again to European cinema, to Luis Buñuel's witty Essayo du Crimen (1955) or to Claude Chabrol's very different but equally remarkable Le Boucher (1969).


This example illustrates too the ways both in which 'serious' cinema influences 'popular' cinema and in which it establishes a continuity of tradition itself. In a 'serious' film made, like Hitchcock's The Lodger only under the broad auspices of Hollywood, The Third Man (1949), the English director Carol Reed includes continual visual references to what it is still to convenient to call German expressionist cinema (and particularly to Lang's M). The film is also notable for the unusual perspective created by sharply-angled camera-shots. The cameraman won the Oscar but the idea was suggested by Reed himself. The Viennese setting of the film and the use of well-known Austrian actors in supporting roles enhances this sense of a homage to the European tradition. In France, earlier in the same decade, the same influences are everywhere apparent in the films of Henri-Georges Clouzot (particularly perhaps Le Corbeau and L'Assassin Habite au 21 or in the sets devised by Jean-Pierre Melville for his 1958 adaptation of Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles. Cocteau, who himself speaks the narrative and who had worked with Robert Wiene during the latter's Paris exile in the thirties, is himself a symbol of the intellectual continuity.


If Clouzot was a sort of spiritual forefather of the French 'nouvelle vague', Melville was in a sense its herald. Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and the other French directors associated with them draw of course heavily on 'popular' Hollywood tradition but the 'nouvelle vague' also has roots in the same intellectual and artistic bedrock of European cinema. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, the French director most influenced by expressionism and by the closely linked theatre and cinema traditions of pre-war Germany, recreates by the use of a collage of posters, advertisements and other paraphernalia of the modern landscape an effect remarkably similar to that achieved by Robert Wiene with the painted sets of Caligari. The ironically titled Made in USA (1966) is a particularly striking example. Godard appreciates more than most the power of the best films from the silent era. His parody-war film Les Carabiniers (1963) is effectively a silent movie with words, complete with interpolated text on cartons (masquerading as postcards from the front) and visual gags that are themselves a homage to the silent film. One of the monstres sacrés of the period, Fritz Lang actually appears (as himself) in another Godard film, Le Mépris (1963).

With Der Kabinett des Doktors Caligari (1919), Nosferatu (1922), Doktor Mabuse (1922), Die Büchse der Pandora (1929) and M (1931), the German cinema had shown itself masterly in its exploitation of the genre known in Europe as the fantastique or in English more quaintly as 'gothic'. The genre grew, as a literary form, out of Romanticism, first in England (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein being today the best known early exemplar) and then in France and Germany. It became one of the most predominant features of German Romanticism, inspiring works by Hoffmann, Von Chamisso and Büchner and pervading almost every aspect of German art. America was not of course any laggard and Edgar Allen Poe remains one of the great masters of the genre. It was the Austrian-born Carl Laemmle and his company Universal that would exploit the genre on film in the United States. Early silent versions, starring Lon Chaney Sr., of two French classics of the genre were amongst the most elaborate and expensive, as well as the most successful, film to come from the studio. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the first film adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel directed by Wallace Worsley, appeared in 1923 and The Phantom of the Opera, an adaptation of a (then) modern work in the same genre by Gaston Leroux by director New Zealand Rupert Julian, appeared two years later.


The real spate of Universal 'horror films' came in the thirties with English director James Whale's celebrated version of Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff and Tod Browning's Dracula starring Bela Lugosi both appearing in 1931 and Browning's Freaks and French-born director Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue (based on the Poe novella) both appearing in 1932. The presiding genius was cameraman Karl Freund, who himself also directed The Mummy in 1932, and interestingly the most evident inspiration came not from the great classics of German cinema but from a less distinguished German film, Boesne and Langener's Der Golem (1920), for which Freund had also been the cameraman. Freund had arrived in the United States in 1929. Apart from Der Golem, he had worked in Germany on Walter Ruttmann's pioneering documentary Berlin Symphonie einer Großstadt (1927), on Lang's Metropolis and on Murnau's Der Letzte Mann (1924). His first film for Universal was Lewis Milestone's Oscar-winning war film All Quiet on the Western front (Universal's first Oscar). Although the early Universal films are undoubtedly in the tradition of the fantastique, the choice of Der Golem (a particularly lurid example) as model is perhaps significant. For with the growth in demand for 'horror' (soon further stimulated by a similar craze in American comic-books), there comes not so much a change in the genre as a change of the genre itself. 'Horror' has acquired such a cult-following that it is difficult to breathe a word of disapproval without invoking howls of protest, but, as with the treatment of the serial killer, there is an evident debasing of the form, sensation once again taking precedence over sensibility, what is originally the means becoming instead (as the very word 'horror' itself suggests) the whole purpose of the exercise. Lang in M uses the serial killer as metaphor and a starting-point for an exploration of the society in which the serial killer lives. The original title The Murderers are Amongst Us emphasised this social purpose and may also, as is often claimed, have been intended, even at this early date, as an allusion to the rise of Nazism. Caligari, Nosferatu, Doktor Mabuse and Die Büchse der Pandora all have a similar social dimension. Frankenstein is a moral and political fable as for that matter is Tod Browning's Freaks (1932). In the 'horror' genre as it later developed there is increasingly little left beyond the mere 'horror' itself.

It is hard not to have a soft spot for the stream of 'horror' films produced by Universal during the thirties, forties and fifties or for the tongue-in-cheek 'horror' classics produced by the British firm Hammer in the sixties or seventies or for the rather camp classics of Mario Bava or George Romero, but they have nevertheless all contributed to a change in, and change of, genre that is in the end rather lamentable. Occasionally the notion of the fantastique has reasserted itself, as for instance with Roger Corman's adaptations of Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), both starring the inestimable Vincent Price or with such British films as Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) or Robin Hardy's justly 'cult' The Wicker Man of the same year, both hugely influenced by the work of Corman. These exceptions, however, tend only to emphasise the nature of the general trend towards a much more banal exploitation of 'horror' for its own sake. Since the problem is with the genre itself rather than with the individual productions, even extremely well crafted films, superbly acted and based on deftly written scenarios - Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1969), William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), Richard Donner's The Omen (1976) or Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) - all betray the same rather depressing tendency. It is significant in itself that the writer Stephen King, master of the slick formulaic horror thriller, is such a predominant influence and the author behind, not only The Shining but also De Palma's Carrie, Reiner's Misery, Romero's Creepshow and countless lesser films in the genre. If the best films are open to criticism, the vast quantity of also-rans, of which John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is a fairly typical if above-average example, have provided cinema producers with a facile output that is rewarding in no sense but the financial.

STILL TO BE CONTINUED